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Ash has picked a great week to put the kombi engine back in....... I am really looking forward to freezing my appendages off this sunday.......Paulee better be coming I don't want him to miss out on the fun
It will be grrrrrreat!....
This weekend we're putting the engine back together but there is still a bit of preparation left to do. Tonight I got our exhaust manifolds in order. The main problem with them is that they are old and pooh.
Now, I did ring around a few places, send some emails and make plenty of enquiries on the forums. Was there a new manifold to be had? Was there a second-hand manifold to be had? Was there a poohty crappy one a bee's penis better than ours? No there wasn't 
The main problem with ours is that the passenger side one has a big hole in it right the way around where the tube meets the flange, a favorite place for some! but not a good thing to have on a registered vehicle. So I cleaned it up and did what could be considered the most dodgy brazing job ever. Please find some equally crappy photos that I took on my phone since there was no better camera at hand, after seeing how badly the photos came out I realised I shouldn't have bothered.
On Saturday I'll be lapping the valves and putting the heads back together and then on Sunday we'll put the whole beast back in the, er, beast. You gotta see the phat muffler I bought as a treat, he he he, Nick's gonna hate it!!! :)
Lads,
Good to see the Kombi is still getting plenty of love! It's probably about time that engine got pulled to bits - it was from a dubious source in the first place and we didn't exactly scrutinize it in detail when we first did the transplant
I reckon just cleaning all the pooh off the cooling fins will probably improve its reliability... But I'm dead keen to see the results of some more internal work, courtesy of Ash's employer!
Oh and an alternative to the Subaru flat four (which would be damn cool, especially if we could tuck an intercooler up there in a rear cooling vent!) is the family of Mazda V6s. They're available in a 1.8, 2.0 and 2.5 and have been transplanted into vehicles as diverse as a VW beetle (at www.offroadvw.net/bajawes/) and a ford laser (at autospeed)
Seems like a pretty versatile donk, and common enough that spare parts shouldn't be a problem. I guess one could also slap twin turbos on there as well!
The engine was a mess. The air cooling had dragged in bugs and crap and little stone chips and all of it was caught up in the cooling fins and tin work. The oil leak was impossible to locate, since there was oil everywhere! Right now the plan is to get it all stripped back and cleaned up.
The inside of the heads are pretty shocking! There's crap everywhere. Nearly everything has come apart in one piece, except for one exhaust stud, which is rooted and needs replacing, and a head stud which is damn tight but will come apart in the vice.
I've got access to a bead blaster at work so we're going to clean everything up, hone all the valves, get a gasket set and reassemble everything nice and tight, it's gonna be sweet!
The Kombi has been running quite nicely for about two years now but since our last trip to Byron Bay in January it's been losing a bit of oil...
How much oil? Around a liter every 1000kms, and it's gushing out enough to be caught up in the turbulence and thrown all over the back of the van. Very messy, very unattractive, and quite concerning since I've no idea where the oil is coming from.
So Marty and I are going to drop the donk, suss out what's happening and give the engine a nice overhaul to keep it running nice. Now, solid advice from anyone is that we should spend some serious money as it is all going to be worth it. Get some new heads ($1100 or so) and new/refurb carbs ($400-$800 depending on what we do) and really get everything right now, since it will save a lot more money down the track.
The thing is, we don't want to do that, especially since the long term aim is to replace the stock VW engine with a nice little Subaru flat four, perhaps with a turbo (or two!) to give us that nice push-along power the Kombi really needs.
But anyway, on to dropping the engine...
